Thinking of death in Plato's Euthydemus: a close reading and new translation

New York: Oxford University Press. Edited by Plato (2022)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Thinking of Death places Plato's Euthydemus among the dialogues that surround the trial and death of Socrates. A premonition of philosophy's fate arrives in the form of Socrates' encounter with the two-headed sophist pair, Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, who appear as if they are the ghost of the Socrates of Aristophanes' Thinkery. The pair vacillate between choral ode and rhapsody, as Plato vacillates between referring to them in the dual and plural number in Greek. Gwenda-lin Grewal's close reading explores how the structure of the dialogue and the pair's back-and-forth arguments bear a striking resemblance to thinking itself: in its immersive remove from reality, thinking simulates death even as it cannot conceive of its possibility. Euthydemus and Dionysodorus take this to an extreme, and so emerge as the philosophical dream and sophistic nightmare of being disembodied from substance. The Euthydemus is haunted by philosophy's tenuous relationship to political life. This is played out in the narration through Crito's implied criticism of Socrates-the phantom image of the Athenian laws-and in the drama itself, which appears to take place in Hades. Thinking of death thus brings with it a lurid parody of the death of thinking: the farce of perfect philosophy that bears the gravity of the city's sophistry. Grewal also provides a new translation of the Euthydemus that pays careful attention to grammatical ambiguities, nuances, and wit in ways that substantially expand the reader's access to the dialogue's mysteries.

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 99,596

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Complex Wisdom in the Euthydemus.Joshua I. Fox - 2020 - Apeiron 53 (3):187-211.
Socrates and the Sophists: Plato's Protagoras, Euthydemus, Hippias major and Cratylus. Plato & Joe Sachs - 2011 - Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing/ R. Pullins Co.. Edited by Joe Sachs & Plato.
Two Kinds of Paideia in Plato’s Euthydemus.Rosamond Kent Sprague - 1998 - The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy 3:269-273.

Analytics

Added to PP
2022-11-19

Downloads
12 (#1,380,345)

6 months
4 (#1,209,293)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Gwenda-lin Grewal
The New School

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references